A History of English Literature

Reformation, and the new nation-state, English drew ahead of Latin for most

purposes, and literature became nationalist. The English poet John Milton wrote

verse in Latin, Greek and Italian, but held that God revealed Himself ‘as is his

manner, first to his Englishmen’ – God’s chosen people.

Yet when he wrote the governmental justification of the execution of King Charles

I, Milton revealed himself to educated Europe in Latin. Dr Johnson wrote verse in

Latin as well as in English. In 1788, four years after Johnson’s death, English was

spoken in Australia. Educated subjects of Queen Victoria read classical and European

languages, and those who ran her empire spoke other languages too. English became

the world’s business language in the 20th century, and though the English are often

monoglot, educated foreigners learn English, and often read English literature. When

the President of China visited England in 2011, he asked to visit Shakespeare’s birth-

place.

Is drama literature?

Drama has been a fundamental category of Western literature since the 5th century

BC, but the question is not stupid. Words are a part of drama, but so are bodies,

moves, gestures, stage, staging and so on. In some plays, words play a small part. Not

all theatre is drama. Even in what is called text-led drama, a line may have no obvi-

ously literary quality. King Lear says in his last scene: ‘Pray you undo this button.’ The

request prompts an action, and Lear says ‘Thank you, sir.’ Eight words require the

performance of several physical actions. The words are right, but gain their power

from the immediate situation, the staged actions that go with them, and from their

place in the play as a whole. So drama is only partly literary, a point easily overlooked

by those who read no plays other than those of Shakespeare, a poetic dramatist.

Only the liter ary part of drama appears here. It diminishes, for the literary

component in English drama declines after Shakespeare. The only 18th-century

plays read today are in prose; they have plot and wit. In the 19th century, theatre was

entertainment, and poetic drama was altogether too poetic. The English take pride

in Shakespeare and pleasure in the stage, yet after 1660 the best drama in the English

to ngue is by Irishmen:Congreve, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Shaw, Wilde, Beckett.

Qualities, quantities, obligation, allocation

‘The best is the enemy of the good’, said Voltaire. As the quantity of literature

increases with population and with cheaper printing, the question of quality becomes

pressing. Literary history, however scholarly, deals largely in accepted valuations.

Another remark of Voltaire, that ancient history is no more than an accepted fiction,

applies also to literary history, though less so in its later stages. All histories of Anglo-

Saxon literature agree that the poetry is better than the prose, and discuss much the

same poems. Later periods also have some traditional arrangements; Restoration

comedy is more discussed than Restoration tragedy. Such agreements should be chal-

lenged, corrected and supplemented, but cannot be silently disregarded.

In this sense, literary history is critical-consensual, deriving from what T. S. Eliot

called ‘the common pursuit of true judgement’. A literary historian who thought that

such figures as Spenser, Dryden, Walter Scott or Eliot (George or T. S.), though

historically important, were overrated could not omit them: the scope for personal

opinion is limited.

8 INTRODUCTION

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